The University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia Museum of Art have been jointly awarded $500,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund an ongoing collaboration over the next three years that provides Penn graduate students in art history with an opportunity to extend their study beyond the classroom through a direct, hands-on engagement with the Museum’s renowned collection. The project allows students to examine individual works of art in detail working alongside Penn professors, Museum curators, conservators, and educators. It is a multi-faceted program that combines scholarship, critical theory, and object-based learning.

“Our faculty and students are delighted by news of the renewed funding for this program,” says Karen Redrobe, the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor in Film Studies, and Chair of Penn’s History of Art Department in Penn Arts and Sciences. “This grant gives us the opportunity to deepen and expand our conversations with conservators, curators and museum educators about how to approach different kinds of art objects as material creations.”